This year, three Canadian writers are among the five authors shortlisted for the second annual Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. 

With a purse of $150,000 (U.S.), the award is the largest specifically for women and nonbinary writers. In honour of the dual citizenship of its namesake, author Carol Shields – she was born in the U.S. but based in Canada, and her books were feted with major awards on both sides of the border – the prize honours excellence in the work of writers in the U.S. and Canada.

Ahead of the May 13 announcement of this year’s winner, Q&Q caught up with Eleanor Catton, Claudia Dey, and Janika Oza to find what significance the prize has for them and what stories they sought to tell in their shortlisted novels. 

Eleanor Catton, Birnam Wood (McClelland & Stewart) 

This isn’t the first major shortlist honour for Birnam Wood, but I wonder what the significance is for you being on a shortlist for a prize that is specifically for women and nonbinary writers?

I’ve found my relationship with my gender is this kind of conversation that’s changing over my career, and how it influences my work is also something that’s constantly changing. So I feel very proud. I’m very excited that the prize exists, and especially excited, because it’s so early in the history of the prize, to think of all the talent in the years to come that’s going to be rewarded and celebrated. 

How has your relationship with your gender and how it affects your work changed?

Earlier on in my career, I think I would have had a different response if somebody had called me a woman writer. I think I would have felt offended, or wanted to be called just a writer. Now I feel very differently about it: I feel very proud if somebody calls me a woman writer. I feel more proud of my gender as I get older, which is maybe more to do with life than it is with work. I think maybe it’s a testament to how the world is changing that [“woman writer”] doesn’t have the derogatory sting it once did. That it’s actually cause for celebration is due to prizes like this – and also the work of women readers. Most people who read novels are women, and so it’s a cultural shift that’s been experienced by people across the board.

The current state of the natural world features prominently in Birnam Wood, and the book has been called an ecological thriller. Why was it important to you to explore these ideas and tell this story?

It’s funny in a way, because the question that was on my mind more than an ecological crisis was social media. I wanted to try to write a book that existed as a kind of anti-social media novel, that would deliver on all of the old-fashioned pleasures that a novel can deliver and give the kind of experience that you can’t ever find on social media: the experience of tension and surprise and escalation and conversation. Real conversation just never happens online. Because I’d made this commitment to giving the characters in the book, particularly the younger characters, a realistic relationship with their devices … I ended up stumbling onto this subplot where we discover early on in the book that the billionaire is secretly mining this national park for rare-earth minerals. 

I was thinking more and more about how reliant we all are on our devices, and that tends particularly to be true of young activists of the kind that the book follows, and all of these devices are full of exactly these minerals. They are created at an untold cost to the environment, and yet we’ve told ourselves that we can’t live without them and that ideologically we oppose the kind of practices that go into their making. I wanted to expose that irony and to implicate those young people in what was happening, because they are the demand.

What is your favourite Carol Shields novel?

I haven’t actually read that many, and I’m seeking to rectify this. I’ll say Swann in the full knowledge that I probably have not yet read one of her novels that may knock that from the top spot. But Swann contains one of the best coinages I’ve ever encountered in any novel. She describes the relationship between a mother and a daughter as “a blood hyphen,” – my heart just stopped when I saw that. I thought, whatever else happens in this book, it’s achieved its goals.

Claudia Dey, Daughter (Doubleday Canada)

What is the significance to you of being shortlisted for a prize specifically for women and nonbinary writers in Canada and the U.S.?

Seismic significance. It’s the most meaningful prize – named for a writer who I worshipped and studied in my apprenticeship in the wild, a writer who took the matter of women’s lives – overlooked and underexamined – and made it the centre of her work. A radical act, and Shields did this artfully, deliberately. Also, in our industry, women and nonbinary writers are still paid less than male writers, make fewer awards’ lists, are reviewed less, so our names and our works are still not out there. The patriarchal canon continues to dominate, and the Carol Shields Prize is correcting this bias in such an inspired and charged way.

Daughter deals with complicated familial relationships – particularly the fraught one between the protagonist and her manipulative father – as well as the ways in which the tapestry of a creative person’s life informs their art-making process. Why was it important for you to tell this story?

I wanted to strike that beautiful, unruly father-daughter nerve. I wanted to convey a father’s power over his daughter, the way he occupies her psyche. A father can be addictive, like a faith; we measure ourselves against his imagined view of our actions and our choices – career, mate, dress, hairstyle. I also wanted to write about making art as making personhood, about the redemptive power of art. Throughout the book Mona contends with what she has lost, and through art, gives grief a shape separate from herself. I am always drawn to writing dimensional women who do not need the lens of another to be made legible to themselves. I wanted the book to have this same agency.

In an Instagram post on the day the prize’s longlist was announced, you called Shields “a central figure in my apprenticeship for her precise prose of the heart.” Can you tell me a little bit more about what you meant by that?

I read Shields to know her, if that makes sense – to experience her mind, her view. I read her for closeness – for closeness to how life feels. She wrote in a direct and unadorned, yet beautiful prose – she never wrote out of vanity and self-delight, but out of curiosity, a deeper calling and search for what it means to be here and how it feels to love.

Larry’s Party or The Stone Diaries? 

The Stone Diaries.

Janika Oza, A History of Burning (McClelland & Stewart)

What is the significance to you of having your debut novel recognized by a prize like this, that is specifically for women and nonbinary writers in Canada and the U.S.?

It feels major, and I don’t take the attention for granted. For the years that I was working on this book, I just truly didn’t believe that anyone would ever want to read it, let alone publish it. Now to be in a place where I’m hearing from readers who are finding that the story resonates with them, who are finding all these personal connections across different histories – migration histories, colonization histories – that in itself is so powerful. On top of that, to have the recognition and the publicity that comes with a major award like this, it’s hard to wrap my head around it. I’m just very, very stunned – which I keep saying – and very grateful.

Your book tells the story of four generations of a family, moving through multiple continents and languages as they are displaced and uprooted by different expressions of what is at heart the same thing – colonialism. Why was it important for you to write this book about these experiences?

I come from a community and from a family that has a very recent history of exile and displacement and multiple forced migrations, and I’ve so rarely encountered that story, the story of my people, in books, in either fiction or nonfiction. There’s also this more personal layer of silence: because of the trauma and because of the loss, my family didn’t really speak about their past because it’s a painful thing to confront. To be able to connect with my community in the process of writing this book, to get to hear stories from those who have gone through it, and then to do my best to write that into a novel which is now receiving more publicity than I could ever have imagined or anticipated, that feels like an honour. I feel so privileged to get to do that work, to try to open up these small spaces for dialogue and for healing.

How does it feel to have a novel like this, about something so personally important to you and to your family, noticed by a major prize? 

Going through the process of publishing the book, and the book tour, and getting to engage with readers and interviewers, the most important thing for me was to always remember and hold on to why I wrote this novel. I wrote it for my family; I wrote it for my community, as well as for myself – to see our history, which is a history that has been very much undocumented and erased, out there and to know that it is coming from within the community. I’ll always say that my most important readers are the people I gave early copies of the book: my family. 

Even with prize recognition, even with this kind of publicity, that’s something that I try to remember and keep at the core. Being shortlisted for the Carol Shields Prize does allow connections to grow, and it lets me hear from more readers who are also getting to have those conversations and making those connections with the book. 

Do you have a favourite Carol Shields novel?

Definitely The Stone Diaries. It’s just a very wise book. 

These interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity.